174 Comments
Jul 11, 2022·edited Jul 11, 2022

“Huge sums of money have been spent in an effort to will into existence a mass social movement to tackle climate change, and it basically hasn’t worked.”

My instinct is that it’s actually worse than this. A message that doesn’t work simply disappears without a trace. But I think that “raising awareness” of climate change has been pretty effective: a lot of people agree that there’s a huge problem and that we should probably do something dramatic about it.

The problem is that there’s no particular agreement on _what_ should be done and frankly the better technocratic solutions in no way flow as an obvious narrative from a basic statement of the problem: bluntly no one tends to think that a real crisis gets solved by a complicated tax regime.

What I think has happened instead is a huge own goal for the left: a gift of energy and motivation to a sort of lay Malthusian instinct that found instant common cause with anti-immigrant know-nothings and what I with tongue only slightly in cheek like to call “left-bourgeois pastoralism” — bluntly if you tell people that a disaster is incoming but all of your plans to head it off sound like egghead nonsense, they’ll decide that the sensible thing to do is pull up the drawbridges, fill the moats and ride out the storm. You could see this pretty clearly in Berkeley, where for years the appointed head of city planning argued vehemently that building any new housing was in contravention to the UN’s climate goals. (Yes really.)

So yes, I’m basically with Matt on the virtue of quietness here: an environmental movement that had focused on the obvious and terrible human health effects of most things that cause carbon emissions would probably be in a much better shape today with far fewer unwanted side effects.

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Matt shouldn't call himself an asshole for (often) favoring the quiet strategy, or claim he's not a total asshole because sometimes he doesn't. If anything I would expect the loud strategy to attract a higher percentage of awful people than the quiet one, independently of which one is more likely to be effective.

Don't let the screamers choose the framing!

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When all is said and done, we aren’t going to solve climate change, are we? I hate using the expression ’virtue signalling’ because idiots misuse the expression, but people only tend to be in favour of climate change policies in as far as it lets them feel like they are fixing something without the hard job of implementation. The feeling is ‘I voted Dem (or Green) and did my bit to solve climate change, wen cheap fuel?’ In the same way, oil companies (or capitalism in general) are blamed for climate change without realising we actually like oil for filling up our stupidly overpowered cars.

Finally, where is the policy coherence from the Democrats? They were REALLY ANGRY with oil companies for producing too much oil as little as a few months ago, but now being REALLY ANGRY with oil companies for not producing or refining enough oil now.

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Enjoy the vacation! I like the selected reposting strategy for some of the days.

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The other issue with climate change is the fear that the burdens fall disproportionately on lower income people. Look at California as a perfect example. Abroad, this is what triggered the "yellow vest" movement in France. Tied to that is the issue that hundreds of thousands of Americans work in fossil fuel related ndustries; like it or not, these jobs are often very well paying. I doubt retrofitting buildings with solar panels woukd be as lucrative. In short, climate change advocates have not yet made a sufficiently persuasive case that these workers have an economically promising future. And if these same workers raise their concerns, they are often dismissed as "deplorables", hardly a way to generate broad-based support for measures loudly advocated by billionaires like Mike Bloomberg or Tom Steyer (who incidentally made a fortune investing in those very fossil fuel industries that he now disparages).

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Italy is the best! Enjoy !!

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It's posts like these that really make me question my commitment to the principle that "life is not a morality play". Because even though that seems an accurate reading of reality, it sure would be instrumentally useful to (rarely! with great caution! to be ceased once concrete goals are met!) relax that suspension of disbelief sometimes. Problems are easier to tackle in Story Mode, with clear Heroes and Villains, where one can Pick A Side. Even technocratic Democrat eggheads often wrap their data with narrative, or have it wrapped for them.

And I'm not even a climate hawk, just a conservative who worries about humanity's ability to stand astride temperature gains and yell "stop!" at *any* point. A difficult thing tried and found wanting, or found difficult and never tried...

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You can pry my gas stove from my cold, nice, upscale liberal hands.

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Loud and soft ought to be a matter of tactics. Th point is what to be loud about. I want Progressives to understand that a carbon tax is the least disruptive thing we can do to actually slow and then reduce the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. If that's not politically possible in July 2022 that's too bad but does not alter realty.

So what IS politically possible. I don't know; I'm just a lowly economist. Some investment in the grid? Go for it. Subsidies for the production of (ideally not investment in) zero carbon energy production? Go for that (making sure the subsidy does not give MORE encouragement than the carbon tax would have). Tell every bureaucrat in every nook of the government when they modify a regulation that the incorporate a cost of net CO2 emitted into the careful cost benefit analyses they conduct before modifying any regulation. [Does unleashing geothermal drillers really require an act of congress?]

BTW this incorporation of the cost of CO2 emissions works both ways. It does not require infinite hostility to the production and transport of fossil fuels. My guess is that it would hardly affect the decision at all in most cases like offshore leasing and the XL pipeline.

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Jul 11, 2022·edited Jul 11, 2022

There seems to be a decent (liberal) consensus that a Carbon Tax is a good idea, but just not politically feasible.

Since you mentioned Social Security's humble beginnings, I'd like some policy wonk (cough cough) that knows more than I do to come up with some clever way of getting a teeny-tiny carbon tax on the books, and then expanded it over time.

Go ahead and effectively bribe the populace by using the proceeds to send out refund checks out at first, though obviously it would be better to direct the money to green infrastructure and R&D...

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Frosts kill more crops than heat. Cold causes more human misery than heat. Cold causes more deaths than heat. Humanity has blossomed as we left the ice age behind.

This is not a law of nature, just the current reality, and heat may soon inflict more pain than cold. However, we are still in a world where a tiny increase in temperatures is a positive good, and there’s probably a meaningful range of temperatures where the net effects of warming are roughly a wash.

Show me global agricultural yields decreasing because of hotter temperatures and I’ll start to worry. Fortunately, agricultural productivity is at an all time high, partly because most plants like warmth.

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Congrats on becoming an S Corp.

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I should probably add on that one thing that helps that Risch-Fulcher bill happen is that Idaho had long been one of only two states (Vermont the other) that had no coal power plants within its borders. I *think* Oregon has finally joined them by shutting down Boardman, and hopefully Washington will be right behind them soon to make the Northwest trifecta if they can shut down Centralia.

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In a typically NPR-like story about climate change and alternative energy that I heard yesterday, the reporter casually stated, "nuclear power may be carbon-free but it does, of course, have a different form of environmental pollution to worry about- nuclear waste." It did prompt me to realize that in all the pro-nuclear green energy convos, I only hear about Chernobyl/Fukushima-type events, and don't ever hear about nuclear waste. Have we "solved" what to do about nuclear waste yet? I honestly don't know much about it!

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Jul 11, 2022·edited Jul 11, 2022

My environmental policy has long been the same as my housing policy: build build build build. Construct all the non-fossil fuel energy you can, it's the only plausible way I see getting out of this mess, and if it succeeds, much of the "loud" stuff can just naturally go away. One of the most thrilling categories of Matt's articles here is strong concurrence with that policy goal.

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So, your plan is to say it quietly and then repost it at intervals.

I hope it works!

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